Difference Between YouTube and YouTu.be URLs

Have you ever thought why Google has both YouTube.com and YouTu.be? What exactly is this YouTu.be thing and how is it different from the regular YouTube.com URLs? Read on to find out the detailed answer!

We all use YouTube to watch our favorite videos. Many of us also upload videos on YouTube, the world’s best and most popular video sharing platform. While watching, uploading and sharing videos we all come across the YouTube.com URLs — but we are sure that you must have seen Youtu.be URLs as well. Have you ever wondered what exactly is the difference between YouTube and Youtu.be URLs? A reader sent us a query on this matter after reading our recent article on creating links to specific time in a YT video. Pretty good and interesting question! Let’s explore the answer!

.com, .org, .net are the most common domain names. As .com signifies a domain name for a commercial entity, the YouTube founders originally chose YouTube.com for their video sharing service. This domain name was registered on 14 February 2005.

In 2006, Google acquired YouTube and in 2009, Google launched the YouTu.be domain name. Here .be stands for Belgium. Although .be is ccTLD of Belgium but there is no rule that bars non-Belgian entities to register a .be domain name. So, Google did register this .be domain name for global purpose. ccTLDs can be registered by anybody in the world and for any purpose. In a number of instances, ccTLDs are registered for a different purpose than to signify the country name. In case of YouTu.be, Google did a play of letters. Similarly, a number of television related websites have .tv domain name. But .tv domain name does not signify television! In fact, it has nothing to do with television. .tv is the ccTLD for the country of Tuvalu.

But why did Google Create YouTu.be?

In 2009, Google registered YouTu.be as a way of shortening the YouTube URLs. At that time the micro-blogging websites (especially Twitter) were becoming popular. These websites allow people to post messages composed in small number of characters. For example, Twitter allows one post to contain a maximum of 140 characters. Therefore it was important to shorten the YouTube URLs as much as possible so that people can easily share them on popular websites like Twitter.

By launching YouTu.be domain name, Google cut short the URL of a video by 15 characters. Take a look at the following illustration. It demonstrates how a YouTu.be URL is 15 characters shorter than the equivalent YouTube.com URL.

Google could further shorten the YouTube URLs if they could reduce the number of characters in video ID (the LIgRmdJMgl4 part in the above illustration). But, as you know, YouTube is a massive video sharing platform. To uniquely identify each video, Google needs an ID with a sufficiently large number of characters. So, Google can not compromise on this part. But by creating YouTu.be domain name, Google smartly saved 15 characters. Twitter loving people would easily understand the importance of this saving!

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Lalit Kumar is the Principal Author and Founder of TechWelkin. He is a web explorer and he enjoys finding useful information on the Internet. He loves to put things together to create a bigger solution. Lalit is passionate about technology, languages and literature. You can contact Lalit via email (techwelkin [at] gmail [dot] com) or Facebook (facebook.com/techwelkin).